The Benghazi attack calls into question the accuracy of intelligence-gathering and whether vulnerable American personnel overseas are receiving adequate protection. Even allies of the president like Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have petitioned the White House for more information about how the government protects diplomatic installations abroad…

[F]urther details about the attack could lay bare lapses in security that could damage the administration. CNN has reported, from a diary belonging to J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador killed in the attack, that he harbored worries about his security. Mr. Williamson, who served as special envoy to Sudan under President George W. Bush, said it was unlikely that Mr. Stevens would not have relayed those concerns to the State Department.

***

The top U.S. intelligence authority issued an unusual public statement on Friday declaring it now believed the September 11 attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, was a “deliberate and organized terrorist attack.”…

Shawn Turner, spokesman for Clapper’s office, said that in the immediate aftermath of the attack, U.S. agencies came to the view that the Benghazi attack had begun spontaneously after protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo against a short film made in California lampooning the Prophet Mohammad…

In an apparent reference to a series of contradictory statements by some top Obama administration officials, Turner said intelligence agencies’ “initial assessment” had been passed on “to Executive Branch officials and members of Congress, who used that information to discuss the attack publicly and provide updates as they became available.”…

Within hours of the attacks ending, some government sources in Washington were already acknowledging they might well have been planned and organized in advance, and that members of two militant factions, Ansar al Shariah and al Qaeda’s North Africa-based affiliate, known as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, may have been involved.

***

This, more than anything, is the problem with the administration’s response. It wasn’t that they failed to provide enough information to the public, but that they provided incorrect information and did so long after it was clear to many in the intelligence community that the political narrative was false.

There are two possible explanations. Either the information widely available to intelligence professionals was not shared with those speaking on behalf of the president. Or those Obama administration officials had the accurate information and chose not to provide it…

Some of the misleading information provided to the public could not possibly have been a result of incomplete or evolving intelligence. The information about security for the ambassador and the compound, for instance, would have been readily available to administration officials from the beginning. And yet when Susan Rice appeared on five political talk shows on September 16, she erroneously claimed that the two ex-Navy SEALs killed in the attack were, along with several colleagues, providing security. They were not. Why did she say this?

Breaking on Hot Air

Blowback

Note from Hot Air management: This section is for comments from Hot Air's community of registered readers. Please don't assume that Hot Air management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment just because we let it stand. A reminder: Anyone who fails to comply with our terms of use may lose their posting privilege.

I am working hard and I don’t mind paying taxes in fact I pay a bigger percentage than Mitt Romney! and no his $ to the church doesn’t count! It is no charity have you seen those tabernacles? Like the leaders living in the Vatican in an equally sham church hey don’t live in shacks now do they? They spend a lot of $ to pass laws like Prop. 8 so no that $ Mitt gives to the poor is very little!

DBear on September 30, 2012 at 12:07 AM

Oh, you don’t mind paying taxes — how big of you, but being so new to the club you obviously still don’t understand the difference between taxes paid on a pay check & taxes paid on capital gains (which is the 2nd time the money is taxed — in Romney’s case that means that money was taxed once at the corporate level of 35% & then again at 15%).

And nice after declaring the rest of us to be “racist homophobic fake Christians’ you expose yourself as the BIGOT you are — what about all that “religious tolerance” that’s in vogue with you anti-Free Speechers now — you know, not “hurting the religious feelings of others is what our country was founded on” — or does that ONLY apply to Muslims & not Mormons.

Hypocrite.

Also, here’s a little math hellp for you — Romney gave 30% of his income to charity last year — his tithe is 10%; that means 20% (or almost $3 million) went to charities OTHER than his church.

Thank you! I would think all of you would all agree I am a good citizen and American rather than the leech and deviant you guys refer to me as . I was selling homeowners insurance when the market crashed and lost my clients and eventually my job. I hit rock bottom but dusted myself off thanks to the safety net you guys want to dismantle and now I am working hard and I don’t mind paying taxes in fact I pay a bigger percentage than Mitt Romney! and no his $ to the church doesn’t count! It is no charity have you seen those tabernacles? Like the leaders living in the Vatican in an equally sham church hey don’t live in shacks now do they? They spend a lot of $ to pass laws like Prop. 8 so no that $ Mitt gives to the poor is very little!

DBear on September 30, 2012 at 12:07 AM

…since you left a half hour or so ago…you might request from rogerb to recall why you had to move to the Bay area…something about losing your job to computer software or something… making your job obsolete…DBearDemintia?

I’m on a contract position in NC now… Not AZ. And trust me, my neighborhood, is rock solid Democrat. The 90% kind.

astonerii on September 30, 2012 at 12:19 AM

NC and VA are in the middle of a massive demo shift. Almost totally pro-democrat. I am not sure if they will stay close enough to go red again this year or in 2016, but I really doubt they will be red after 2020.

Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget.

But in the pantheon of toxic issues — the famous “third rails” of American politics — none stands taller than overtly acknowledging that elderly Americans are not entitled to every conceivable medical procedure or pharmaceutical.

[snip]

No one wants to lose an aging parent. And with price out of the equation, it’s natural for patients and their families to try every treatment, regardless of expense or efficacy. But that imposes an enormous societal cost that few other nations have been willing to bear. Many countries whose health care systems are regularly extolled — including Canada, Australia and New Zealand — have systems for rationing care.

One of my wally’s newly minted associates…wears a hijab.
I hope to gosh she’s not a cashier-unless she’s willing to ring up anything and EVERYTHING that comes through her line.
beyond that-I’m reserving judgement…for now.

I used their e-mail link to say that my Jewish neighbor wants separate checkouts for meat and dairy and I prefer a meatless checkout on Friday.

timmytee on September 30, 2012 at 12:17 AM

Despite the fact that I’m on the verge of making 5 digits(take home) for the first time in my life-I’ll walk out if Wally’s pulls a Wegmans. We already are getting FULLY veiled muzzie women in the store(we’re not too far from a mosque)and management is doing NOTHING. In another 20-30 years(max) Lubbock is gonna be the Dearbornistan of the West.

There are only a few republicans I work with, none of whom like Romney. Mostly they just don’t trust him, given his history. They both are planning to write-in Santorum. They still talk about him and his daughter, whose name I can’t remember right now. No one talks about Romney in a good way, even though most are strongly opposed to Obamacare.

Buckshot Bill on September 30, 2012 at 12:19 AM

So basically, you work with a bunch of idiots who trust Obama more than Romney, despite their strong opposition to Obamacare & the fact that his re-election 100% guarantees it doesn’t get repealed.

I bought a house after the crash. Cheap, paying 4% interest on it. Its my best debt. Everything else has to go that has a floater in it. Any bank lending money right now at these rates is insane I think. Inflation is on the way.

It is one of many things Romney will face if elected. But make no mistake, if he screws up, I will blame him, I will blame Obama and I will blame everyone that should have fixed things. The time for letting politicians off the hook because they wear the (R) branding is over for me.

It was almost over when i was called xenophobe by my own party. I think I was angrier back then than I am about Romney!

IIRC from geology classes, small earthquakes are common just about everywhere. They never made the news locally until the Barnett shale gas field became viable and the eco-nuts went on their latest “technology will kill us all” crusade. I think they are just looking for an excuse to say “fracking”.

I never said they were representative, only an anecdote. There is no direct evidence in this area of MO that Romney is ahead statistically in the state. And this is a very red region. Given that Obama will certainly win the KC and STL vote, Romney needs this area to win the state. Most polls show Romney ahead here right now, though Rasmussen had him down by 1 a few weeks ago and only plus 3 right now. Which is probably more accurate than PPP which has him plus 12.

IIRC from geology classes, small earthquakes are common just about everywhere. They never made the news locally until the Barnett shale gas field became viable and the eco-nuts went on their latest “technology will kill us all” crusade. I think they are just looking for an excuse to say “fracking”.

Well, maybe the future will belong to those who empower women and don’t diss Mohammed. But maybe it’ll belong to albino midgets who wear pink thongs. Who knows? Que sera sera, whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see. But one thing we can say for certain is that the future will not belong to broke losers. You’re the brokest guy in the room, you’re the president of Brokistan. You’ve got to pay back $16 trillion just to get back to having nothing, nada, zip. Who the hell are you to tell us who the future’s going to belong to?

Eye candy is in the eye of the beholder. And to the baying mob from Tunis to Jakarta those dead Americans and al-Qaeda flags over U.S. embassies and an entire USMC air squadron reduced to charred ruins are a veritable Willie Wonka production line of eye candy. To the president, they’re just “bumps in the road” to the sunlit uplands of “the future.” Forward! Obama has lived on “the promise of the future” all his life — Most Promising Columbia Grad of 1983, Most Promising Community Organizer of 1988, Most Promising Fake Memoirist of 1995, Most Promising Presidential Candidate of 2008 . . . The rest of us, alas, have to live in the present that he has made, which is noticeably short of promise. The Chinese Politburo get it, Czar Putin in the Kremlin gets it, and even the nutters doing the “Death to the Great Satan!” dance on the streets of Cairo and Lahore get it. On November 6, we will find out whether the American people do.

Just because you are more adept at it than DBear who comes right out & arrogantly calls us all racist, homophobic fake Christians, doesn’t mean I don’t see what you’re doing.

Dark Star on September 30, 2012 at 12:39 AM

McCain called SC anti-mormon bigots for voting for Newt in the Primary and not Romney. I have never called Romney voters racist, homophobes, or fake Christians. Half my family are Jehovah Witnesses, so I know a lot about fake Christians.

Mormons can be a bit odd at times, but are generally well behaved and hard workers. JW’s live off the government and annoy people. Especially Catholic family members. Trust me on this. I have a never ending supply of moldy Watchtowers sitting on the edge of my front porch; more of them every single day.

The state is always going to be close, but I think it will eventually become a blue state.

Buckshot Bill on September 29, 2012 at 11:57 PM

Not gonna happen. While FL will probably always stay a purplish swing state, it’s been trending more red than blue the last couple of decades. Before Jeb got elected as gov in ’99, there had been only two Republican governors since the end of the Civil War. He was the first Republican gov to ever win a second term.

The FL legislature was solidly Democratic until the ’90s as well. But in 1992, the FL Senate went red and in 1996, the FL House of Reps. went red. Been red ever since.

Remember, in ’08, FL only went for Obama by 2.8% and we know that a lot of that was ‘shiny new thing’ syndrome. :P

I’m in the Tampa Bay end of the I-4 swing corridor and we had about 3,000 enthusiastic people for a Ryan rally in wee little Oldsmar. Plenty of enthusiasm even in purple land. :)

Perhaps. Dem voters seem to be fleeing the deep blue states and flocking towards red territory. Turning the red to blue very rapidly.

It is happening in NV, CO, VA, NC, GA, and other states. Only WI is seriously turning redder. The long-term trend is for the low population red states to become purple, the high pop blue to remain mostly blue.

Maybe FL has a large enough red population to offset demo shifts. Plus much of the growth is with Cubans, and they tend to vote Republican. But then I never thought VA would go blue so soon, and now it looks to remain that way. I am pessimistic in the long-term for the Republican party’s national electoral prospects.

You know, I keep repeating it. Apologies. :) I think we win, and I think we can get on with it — but a whole lot of what Steyn is bringing up lately is still gonna be trashing up the place. Lots and lots of people are going to actually vote for Obama. There’s so much damage to clean up.